Goodnight Mommy

I went into Goodnight Mommy without knowing anything about this movie except that it's around 100-minutes long and that I had 100 minutes to spare. And it ended up being a very decent and enjoyable movie.

Co-directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, Goodnight Mommy follows a very horror-esque approach to match its growingly eerie tone. The movie tells the story of a pair of twin brothers who suspect their mother who just underwent a face-altering Costmetic surgery, of being a doppleganger. With incidents that end up making the boys grow more and more suspicious, they eventually default to having no other choice but to protest their mother through growingly violent means.

The success of Goodnight Mommy is that it's written in a way that makes you sympathetic to why the boys feel and react the way they do, even though you know it's the adult who's in the right. You feel like the violence against her is justified and then you realize that from an objective point of view, there's no reason for us to be rooting for the twins.

It's enjoyable in a very engaging way, and even the twist ending (yes, it's a twist ending movie) landed effectively. The movie, from a technical standpoint, is beautiful... with the overall imagery and the isolating production design adding to the charm of the movie. There's nothing too brilliant about it, but there's nothing to compain about either. It was a decent way to spend the 100 minutes I had without any regrets.

And one of the most depressing. Just like last year's the Babadook, it's interested in a lot of the same themes, But, unlike The Babadook, it's also so hard to watch that it stops being very exciting or entertaining. It really puts back the meaning in "horror", for better or worse. It's so not a fun time in any way shape or form, and I think at the end of the day that really does differ it to many other horror films. But it also makes it much harder to rate as a whole. It's so incredibly bleak and there's no stylization of any kind. I don't get the criticisms of the twist being obvious though... it IS obvious, but I thought that was the point. I kind of saw it more like the film giving so many clues throughout the film so we could come up with what was going on and see and perceive the film in a different level. I don't see the mother mentioning it explicitly at the end as some sort of "AHA! Got you" moment at all. I mean, anyone who's paying attention to the film would've deduced that far before the ending. Fun? No. Effective? Yes, almost devastatingly so.

A Austrian psychological drama horror that might not suit everyone just because it is a little bit on the slow side for the first half in particular and is then merely suggestively unsettling than a full on scare.

But the slow build-up kept my interest and it definitely paid off in the end.

I've read here that some people thought it was too predictable, but I must disagree because there were elements to the story that I had to go here to the message-boards to properly understand, and by then it all made sense of course.

It could be because I am currently sick so my brain isn't working properly lol but I really don't think so, and I can usually tell how a horror movie is gonna end half asleep anyway.

So yeah, recommended for patient viewers who's looking for a horror that isn't all about cheap jump scares but more of a psychological one.

I ended up liking this movie more than I thought I was going to from what I was feeling about halfway through.

It started off as a spooky/creepy horror/thriller, then not a whole lot happened... then moved into body horror. If they had shaved off about 20 minutes of what was, to me, kinda superfluous filler... I think this would have been much more successful. I get building tension and being atmospheric however there were times it dragged a bit.

It was shot beautifully and the acting was good all around. The "twist" was so obvious from about ten minutes in that I feel like it must have been purposeful (?) and almost the director/writers basically saying "that's not the point", or that's what I hope at least because a twist it was not.

This is a really cool concept to take and do a full blown horror with. This almost felt a bit like "introductory horror". Regardless I still think it was successful for what it was and I would recommend as long as you are patient with slow burns.

Twin boys move to a new home with their mother after she has face changing cosmetic surgery, but under her bandages is someone the children don't recognize.

If you enter in to this film after seeing the trailer, you might be disappointed or at least mislead. Whoever edited that thing make the music scarier, the action more intense, and that is just simply not what the film is about.

Instead, we get a slow burn that is on some levels a horror film, but on other levels a sad story that has far too much grounding in reality. The true scariness of the film is not the mask, as you might think from the trailer, but rather the interactions of a family that is unable to completely build trust.